“A Rainbow in the Cloud”
They don’t tell you that motherhood is mostly learning how to let go. Not just once when they leave the nest, but again and again—small releases tucked inside every season of raising them. And each goodbye feels like practice for the next.
The day I dropped my son off for college a second time, my heart was caught between pride and ache. He was ready after a long summer, but not completely. Confident, but still clinging to the comforts of home. And I was there, both wanting to hold on tighter and knowing I had to let go…again.
On the drive to deliver the last round of “survival supplies” I’d gathered for him, the sky gave me a gift. A rainbow halo glowed softly behind a lone cloud. No rain had fallen, no storm had passed. Just a simple cloud, refracting sunlight into unexpected color.
And I couldn’t help but see myself in it. The cloud felt heavy, uncertain, full of unrealized tears—just like me. But the rainbow whispered a different story: even in the middle of the ache, there is beauty. There is always beauty. You don’t have to wait for storms to pass to find blessing. Sometimes the light is already hidden in the very thing that feels so hard.
As I stocked his new dorm room, I realized what the rainbow was asking of me: to shift my perspective. Yes, he was moving farther away from me, but he was also moving closer to himself. College is that strange middle space—a protected taste of adulthood before the final leap. And I had the gift of sending him off with a few reminders of home, woven into the room where he would begin again.
This is what the season feels like: a rainbow behind a cloud. The cloud is the letting go, the long hug at the door, the quiet house when I come home. But the rainbow is everything else—the pride in who he’s becoming, the joy of watching him fly, the shimmer of possibility stretched across his future and the excitement of watching him write his own story.
The truth is, motherhood rarely offers neat endings. Instead, it gives us clouds—those heavy, uncertain moments of change—and asks us to trust that the light is still there, refracting us into something new.
That rainbow in the cloud was the reminder I needed: even in goodbye, even in the ache of letting go, love refracts into a perfect arrangement of colors.
And that, too, is beautiful.
With you in the refracting,
Emily
Ash and Bloom